Traditional paper coupons have been in use for decades to encourage consumers to purchase products. However, paper coupons lead to negative customer experiences. The effort spent to find and clip the coupons may be wasted when the coupons are forgotten. Also, the negative environmental affect of printing additional newspaper pages for coupons that are not used and thrown away is recognized by an environmentally conscious population. Although paper coupons have negative characteristics, they do allow manufactures and retailers to encourage purchasing of products. Additionally, coupon usage may be tracked by databases to determine customer buying trends and patterns. For example, conventional point of sale (POS) systems may collect coupon data along with all of the other purchases made by a particular consumer. This may allow a retailer to determine that customers who purchased one product are likely to purchase a second product if an incentive (e.g. coupon) is given, for example, with the first product for a discount on the second product. However, these examples only relate to products that the customer purchased and coupons that were redeemed.
In contrast, online retailers may track additional customer preferences by tracking products that a customer has viewed but did not purchase. This is accomplished by storing and analyzing information regarding the products selected for viewing by the customer. For example, the viewed web pages associated with products may be tracked. This additional data may help retailers more accurately predict the desires of a customer than purchasing information alone. In some cases, information regarding what was already purchased may no longer be useful to a retailer because the desire may be satisfied forever by the purchased product. However, information on what was viewed but not purchased may lead to more effective marketing because it targets desires that may not yet be satisfied.
Unlike online stores, retailers with physical locations have traditionally not been able to track offers and products that customers viewed but did not purchase. Some unusual systems have attempted to track customer product viewing in physical store locations but they have met with limited success. For example, infrared tracking systems have been utilized to track the movements of customers through a store. However, these systems have the drawback of not always being able to pinpoint the product being viewed by the customer. Instead they may only provide the general location of a customer in a store. Additionally, infrared tracking systems are considered by some customers to be an invasion of privacy and their use is regarded as Orwellian.